Getting the balance between an open, free and fair Internet and protecting young people is not easy. Governments often use a knee-jerk approach to tackle increases of pornography, incitement and violence online and in doing so hit perfectly acceptable websites.

It is worth poinitng out that British politicians have been caught out many times accessing the very pornography that they claim to want to protect others from, leaving many to question the motives of this censorship.

In July 2015 the Daily Express posted a report titled "Outrage as Parliament computers access porn sites 20,000 TIMES a month" as an exclusive but look online and you can find similar allegations against British politicians dating back some time. The Express wrote;

More than 247,000 attempts to visit X-rated sites were made on the parliament's network last year, with figures spiking when MPs were on holiday from the chamber.The most popular month was April, with a staggering 42,000 visits made to pages classed as pornographic by officials – more than 1,300 a day.After April, the next most popular month for visits to porn sites in 2014 was October – with more than 30,000 hits.In December, visits to porn sites doubled to 20,000 compared to the previous year.It is not known specifically what websites the computers were trying to access or how long was spent on the pages.

It adds to a shocking total of 350,000 visits in 2013, including 75,000 in November and 69,000 in April.

Without any specific information the reasons for access are not clear. Some may have been for the purpose of research but would ordinary members of the electorate be allowed such excuses?

If you operate a website online it could be classed as 'adult' themed and censored by British authorities but Open Rights Group has alerted us to an online tool which can quickly and easily check any URL.

We thought we would check out NEWTEKWORLDNEWS at the resource and are pleased to report we came out smelling fresh. There was however this point to note;

We're testing using the default "adult content" filter levels for each network. This means the degree of filtering varies across our test lines. Our results may differ from your experience if you use another level of filtering on your network, or if filters are disabled.

It’s been a year since we launched blocked.org.uk, a tool that lets people check whether websites are incorrectly blocked by filters. At its launch, we showed that around 1 in 5 sites were blocked by some kind of parental control. We knew that many of these websites posed no harm to children. Over the last year, we’ve heard from businesses, bloggers and charities whose sites have been censored. Many had no idea that this was happening and without blocked.org.uk they wouldn’t have been able to find out or get their websites unblocked. The Government has also now acknowledged that overblocking is a problem, but they and the ISPs are underestimating how many sites are being affected. Filters don’t always work and relying on them can lull parents into a false sense of security. Last week, the Prime Minister announced that he wanted to force porn sites to use age verification or to be shut down. But what the Blocked project has shown is that there are no simple tech solutions to social problems.

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